Modern Novels: How to Make them More Relevant to High School Students

There have been numerous studies conducted researching ways to reinvent how we teach outdated texts that are increasingly losing relevance to the current generation of students because of gaps in interest and culture. Because of this irrelevancy, students do not understand these books as well and are not thinking critically about the issues that they present. My research follows along the same lines, but deals specifically with the increasing irrelevancy of modern novels. I distributed a questionnaire to the class I observe at a local high school. My findings have been that modern novels, while lacking relevance with many students, still have the potential to be connected relevantly to many students in the class by relating the story and the characters' experiences to similar experiences in the lives of the high school students.